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Gereon Wolters' Mach I, Mach II, Einstein, und Die Relativitätstheorie. Eine Fälschung und Ihre Folgen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Robert Disalle
Robert Disalle*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario
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Extract

Historians of relativity theory have puzzled over the fact that, while Einstein regarded Ernst Mach as his chief philosophical mentor, Mach himself publicly rejected relativity in the preface to Die Prinzipien der physikalischen Optik. This work was first published by Mach's son Ludwig in 1921, five years after Mach's death, but the preface is dated “July 1913”, when Einstein was working on general relativity and believing not only that he had Mach's “friendly interest” and support, but also that his project was the working-out of some of Mach's suggestions. To Einstein, whose sympathy for Mach's overall philosophy of science had already begun to wane by 1921, the posthumous appearance of the preface seemed to underscore the inconsistency between Machian positivism and his own program to construct an abstract and geometrical physics; this interpretation appears in important modern analyses like Blackmore (1972), Holton (1988), and Zahar (1989), and it has frequently served the purposes of the philosophical reaction against logical positivism in general. Now Gereon Wolters' book (translation: Mach I, Mach II, Einstein, and the Theory of Relativity. A Forgery and its Consequences) challenges the usual interpretation with a startling claim: that Ernst Mach never wrote the preface, which in fact is a forgery by his son Ludwig. The words “A Forgery and its Consequences” suggest the sweeping consequences that the preface has had for our understanding of the relation between Mach and Einstein; the point of the book is not only to document the dramatic story of the forgery, but also to defend an equally sweeping reconsideration, indeed a rehabilitation, of Mach's philosophy and its role in the history of relativity.

Type
Critical Notice
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 712 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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